YC Tech Stacks

http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/yc-tech-stacks/

by bootload • 10 years ago

336 99 10 years ago

minimaxir• 10 years ago

The chart at the bottom (now that it's fixed; thanks!), if you remove the Google outliers, shows that there is little correlation between the market share of a given SASS within its category and the number of YC startups that use it.

As a result, the conclusion is that YC companies just use whatever the hell they want, not what is "best."

wslh• 10 years ago

It would be interesting to have also information about the frontend. Are they using Bootstrap/Foundation/etc? What other JS libs are they using for the presentation layer?

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

You can get that info one by one with their Chrome extension. Front end framework detection was not perfect in the limited ~10 startups I examined.

spydertennis• 10 years ago

some good data on best in class saas

ruffrey• 10 years ago

I was hoping it was a list of the tech stacks they used to build their software, like Node.js, C, Clojure, Redis, etc

tomphoolery• 10 years ago

That was also what I thought this article was going to be about. Still pretty interesting, though.

jlteran• 10 years ago

http://stackshare.io/stacks might have what you are looking for. Although not all YC companies are on there, some of the more well-known companies are.

MichaelGG2• 10 years ago

Yeah PG should attempt to validate his claim that a better language is actually an advantage. They should have enough data to draw some sort of conclusions. Or be able to ask ex founders if they didn't collect it beforehand. Of course all this compared against various success metrics.

Also good to know when people ended up switching stacks and for what reasons.

sotojuan• 10 years ago

Good point. I don't know what PG considers a "better" language (aside from Lisp), but I'd make a random guess and say that most YC companies are using JavaScript, Ruby, Python, or Go for their backend.

gaius• 10 years ago

Reddit tried Lisp and moved to Python, quite famously. Viaweb it turns out is not extrapolatable to, well, any other website or company. The real lesson is, use whatever language you already know.

palderson• 10 years ago

You can see some of that info via Siftery - https://siftery.com/groups/y-combinator-portfolio?activetab=...

biot• 10 years ago

Yeah, I'd say this is more of a service stack. If someone asks you what you do for email, it would be odd to say "my tech stack is Gmail". Is Gmail's tech stack Gmail?

1123581321• 10 years ago

83% WordPress usage among CMS users seems high, but 22% using a CMS at all seems low. Presumably most using a CMS just want a blog and a few pages? Any kind of complicated content structure goes straight to custom development? Does this account for static generators like Jekyll or CMSes that don't provide information about themselves?

netule• 10 years ago

I would think that many of them don't expose plainly the fact that they're powered by WordPress or only use it as a backend/authoring solution with a custom frontend.

brightball• 10 years ago

Probably a lot using static generators like Hugo.

prawn• 10 years ago

Might be because often the standard content pages are a small part of many startup sites so they just tack something custom onto their site build rather than use a full CMS.

vincent_s• 10 years ago

Could be that a lot of them have their blog under a subdomain (blog.company.tld) and Datanyze only scrapes the main page.

caust1c• 10 years ago

CloudFlare is not a hosting provider.

Interesting analysis nonetheless.

jacquesc• 10 years ago

They provide a basic CDN hosting service, essentially asset caching.

corysama• 10 years ago

On the line after talking about using CloudFlare as a hosting provider, they separately talk about using CloudFlare as a CDN.

drewvolpe• 10 years ago

"Only 21% of YC companies are A/B testing, but 93% use Optimizely"

This doesn't sound right. I wonder if the writer meant "93% of the 21% who do A/B testing use Optimizely".

__derek__2• 10 years ago

That's how I read it: 21% A/B test, of whom 93% use Optimizely.

martin_• 10 years ago

I agree, that said, I think it's hard to say the 79% _don't_ A/B test. Could easily be homegrown, or round-robin based, or perhaps it was only included on a specific page.

portman• 10 years ago

Also, I take it to mean 21% use a client-side A/B testing framework.

You could be performing A/B testing server-side and it would not be detected using this approach (which ultimately boils down to greping the HTML for known strings).

rezashirazian2• 10 years ago

That's how I read it. Basically 19.5% of all YC use Optimizely.

SLaber894• 10 years ago

Yes, the latter.

93% of the YC companies that we found using an A/B tester were using Optimizely. This, however, does not account for server-side testing as mentioned in the thread.

ktamura2• 10 years ago

Some of the juxtapositions/language are bizarre.

2. Of the YC companies that use hosting providers, 55% use AWS, 13% use Cloudflare and 6% use Rackspace.

Comparing Cloudflare and AWS? Where's GCP or Azure?

3. Of the YC companies that use a CDN, 68% use Amazon CloudFront, 7% use Cloudflare and 5% use Fastly.

Okay, so there's a separate section for CDN...

8. Only 22% of YC sites use a third party CMS. Of those, 83% use WordPress.

"3rd party" CMS? As opposed to...a custom made web app?

11. In terms of installs, the most common Analytics providers are Google Analytics (451), Google Universal Analytics (314), Mixpanel (183) and Optimizely (129).

I thought Google Universal Analytics was an updated version of Google Analytics.

That said, this kind of market research is incredibly valuable.

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

Some of the juxtapositions/language are bizarre.

The author is non-technical, but I agree it's confusing.

I thought Google Universal Analytics was an updated version of Google Analytics.

I wonder if they are looking at multiple sources for a company, for example, the blog, marketing site, dev site, web app, etc.

ktamura2• 10 years ago

Neither am I =) It's a matter of doing fact-checking/analysis.

SLaber894• 10 years ago

Hey, so i'll attempt to clear the air a bit. Didn't think this would trend like it did..

Cloudflare - chalk this up as a mistake. I have a marketing background, so not too well versed in the infrastructure space. I'll ask Macro to make an edit for me :)

"As opposed to...a custom made web app?" - correct.

Google Analytics vs Universal Analytics - Correct, Universal is an update, but many still use GA standard. The GA # (451) is all encompassing, the GUA # (314) is the subset of GA users that use the update.

Granted, there is much room for improvement in both the information given and the semantics behind it, but I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thought it would be interesting for people to see since a lot of this stuff usually operates behind the black curtain.

gbrayut• 10 years ago

Thanks for the writeup! I enjoyed reading it and comparing with some of our vendor/stack choices.

gk1• 10 years ago

LinkedIn ads don't have tracking scripts or pixels, so not sure how they're getting the number for that. Certainly can't be accurate.

blahi• 10 years ago

They don't?

bluedino• 10 years ago

> Of the YC companies that use hosting providers, 55% use AWS, 13% use Cloudflare and 6% use Rackspace.

No love for Linode?

ryanmerket• 10 years ago

I'd love to see all the major cloud and hosting providers here.

overcast3• 10 years ago

So besides the boring stuff listed in this article, how about the database servers and developer environments? The actual tech stack running the show.

bootload5• 10 years ago

"So besides the boring stuff listed in this article"

Not boring if you want to target YC batch companies. In fact it is quite the opposite. The niches here are hacker-rich and as such could be used as a guide to build new products. That is the reason I posted it.

nightski• 10 years ago

YC Ad Stacks

filmDeveloper• 10 years ago

No self-respecting developer would ever include the items enumerated in this list as part of their "tech stack."

This is barely even an "ops stack." It's more like a shopping list for canned goods.

ebbv2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure I would characterize this as boring stuff so much as only like a third of the picture.

When the article was titled "tech stacks" I was hoping to learn about the actual tech stacks, not just the front end stuff. Like what's actually answering the HTTPS requests? nginx? Apache? Node? Passenger? Tomcat?

What's the DB system?

What OS?

Heck even from front end we're missing who's using Angular, who's using Ember, who's using Bootstrap, etc.

I wouldn't have titled this "Tech Stacks". Maybe "marketing and analytics software."

overcast3• 10 years ago

That's exactly what my point was. I was anticipating a bit more in depth analysis beyond a few third party services everyone uses.

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

FWIW their Chrome extension (free to try) does seem to detect Bootstrap consistently, but front end frameworks were hit or miss depending on the site for me.

Still the amount it does uncover quickly is impressive.

https://www.datanyze.com/insider

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

It seems like their tool gathers data from commonly exposed endpoints, etc. Doable for some backend web frameworks, web servers, etc, but much harder for the tech stack on the backend. To me that would be more interesting to have too.

StackShare [0] is working on that problem. It's all self-reported for now. It's pretty cool to be able to see the full stack of HyperDev [1] (exceptionally good post) or GitHub [2] for instance (average post).

I looked up the Datanyze report for my own startup and most of the information is outdated by 6–12 months and/or incomplete... I'm curious where they sourced it from. CrunchBase looks like one source.

[0] http://stackshare.io

[1] http://stackshare.io/hyperdev/the-hyperdev-tech-stack-poweri...

[2] http://stackshare.io/github/github

ec109685• 10 years ago

How do you envision it not being self reported?

angersock• 10 years ago

What makes you think that the tech is the part of YC company's worth learning from?

The bizdev stuff here is more useful.

westernmostcoy• 10 years ago

2. Of the YC companies that use hosting providers, 55% use AWS, 13% use Cloudflare and 6% use Rackspace.

Cloudflare is a CDN exclusively, right? Why are they counted among the hosting providers and not with CDNs in the next line?

ebbv2• 10 years ago

Yeah CloudFlare is not a hosting provider, so that piece seems erroneous. They are on the CDN line below, I just don't understand why they ended up on this line. Maybe because people's DNS points at CloudFlare?

grape_4• 10 years ago

That's correct, but it's very difficult to determine the hosting environment if you're using a CDN. I have a write up on my blog at https://www.gra.pe/?p=36. But the idea is that if you know the hosting IP, you now where the IP sits (ASN). If you determine the ASN, you know which provider is being used.

grape_4• 10 years ago

To add to this - what they probably did was run an nslookup or dig against the domains themselves. And whatever IP resolved for those domains, they checked who owned that IP space. With a CDN, it won't show AWS, it'll show the CDN.

SLaber894• 10 years ago

Yep! Apologies for the misinformation here.

rezashirazian2• 10 years ago

2. Of the YC companies that use hosting providers, 55% use AWS, 13% use Cloudflare and 6% use Rackspace.

No Azure? considering how much Microsoft gives away with their bizspark program, this is surprising.

jmspring• 10 years ago

I'd be curious why. If there are issues, happy to try and help out.

MatthewMcDonald• 10 years ago

We tried to use Azure for a new system ~8 months ago (it's hard to pass up that much money). Spinning up a vm with the image we needed and a static ip was not possible with the GUI. The specific image we needed was only accessible on the "new" portal, but a static IP could only be assigned from the "old" portal. It's theoretically possible to set it up with PowerShell, but after spending over a week of poring over outdated and incomplete documentation and opening support tickets, we switched to AWS and had it running in a few hours.

Even if we did get it to work, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable investing in a platform where something as simple as "create a vm with this image and assign a static ip" isn't straightforward. It could be better now, but for us (and most other young startups) the time of our engineers is much more scarce than hosting costs.

wpietri• 10 years ago

Is that surprising? Early on, I wouldn't worry much about server cost. Salaries are usually the big budget item, and I'd lean toward boring/default choices for anything that isn't absolutely vital for demonstrating traction.

Then if a startup hits the growth phase, I'd expect server costs are still relatively low priority.

sseveran3• 10 years ago

AWS gives away a some as well.

https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

Remember new YC cos get beaucoup Azure credit now. (I'm not sure how much they get on AWS.) It would be interesting to see if the offering has had an effect.

We are happy to announce the Microsoft will be giving $500,000 of free Azure hosting credit to YC startups in our Winter 2015 batch and future batches.

https://blog.ycombinator.com/$500k-of-azure-credit-for-yc-st...

grape_4• 10 years ago

I ran a similar study a while back - I was curious to see if the YC incentives for startups (Azure credits, Amazon credits, Digital Ocean credits, etc.) were significantly swaying founders to use a technology stack.

You can find a quick analysis of registrars and DNS providers here - https://www.gra.pe/?p=77

You can find architecture analysis here - https://www.gra.pe/?p=36

Interesting stuff.

grape_4• 10 years ago

Also, I'm assuming Datanyze used the publicly facing domain of each of these websites (very similar to what I've done). What you'll notice is a lot of these startups have APIs or apps that have very different domains than the ones being used for their landing pages. I spoke to the folks at Bizspark about this and Azure adoption is pretty high (I believe these are private numbers).

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

Is the most popular domain registrar among YC cos really GoDaddy?

This seems pretty unusual given industry trends over the past, 5+ years. Do you separate GoDaddy resellers from GoDaddy direct?

Update: They are not separated.

I see Namecheap come up in a lot of hackernews posts for recommended registrars. I’m assuming since Namecheap and many other popular startup-friendly registrars are both resellers of GoDaddy and eNom and are ICAAN accredited registrars, the WHOIS lookup may not reflect the proper registrar (i.e. they may show up as eNom instead of Namecheap).

I'm also surprised to see AWS Route 53 omitted as a registrar, and possibly as a name service, unless that's what "Amazon" under DNS refers to.

Still this data is useful and nice to have as a point of reference.

manigandham• 10 years ago

What is a "startup-friendly registrar"?

Godaddy has lots of annoying upsells in their checkout flow but they're cheap, fast and work just fine as a registrar and DNS host.

zzleeper• 10 years ago

    AdWords comes in fourth with 130

Any reason for this?

marcofloriano• 10 years ago

I think it's because they mostly spend money on current customers not new ones. To attract new customers they probably use another ways (like SEO, cold call, and so on).

SLaber894• 10 years ago

I thought this was interesting too. We usually see AdWords more highly adopted than FB, Twitter, etc.

sergiotapia2• 10 years ago

If you're interested in startup tech stacks, we have a lot of different ones curated at StackShare.

http://stackshare.io

Some well known startups are "verified" with a blue checkmark, which means they update their tech stack themselves so look out for that.

pajop3• 10 years ago

btw - https://www.datanyze.com/domain/?tab=info&domain=stackshare....

sergiotapia2• 10 years ago

It's asking me to create an account. Can you take a screenshot?

s_kilk• 10 years ago

Heads up, I clicked on the "claim this page" link for BedquiltDB (my sideproject) at http://stackshare.io/bedquiltdb, and got a generic server error page.

ttcbj• 10 years ago

FWIW, I went to stackshare today and was interested in the stackups feature. For the first time ever, I decided to click that I used something (bootstrap), then I ended up registering through github and submitting my site.

However, once I was logged in, I could not find a way to get back to stackups. The top/left home icon takes me to trending tools and stacks. Posts seems to be stacks of major companies. Tools and services doesn't have stackups.

I searched for searched for "Stackups" in your search bar, and the top result was "Stackups". I clicked more. It lists 50 results, but then no actual results were listed.

I was only able to get back to the stackups by logging out, and returning to the home page. Maybe I am missing something obvious, but just FYI that was my experience.

pranaysharma• 10 years ago

Why no one uses services from providers like Digital ocean and linode . They are cheap and reliable?

grapehut• 10 years ago

Both are great for hobby projects, and offer pretty great bang for buck, but I'd never run consider running anything serious on either, let a lone a business.

Some examples:

== Not pay bills (yeah, yeah, I should check my email more often when a credit card expires) ===

* Digital Ocean: All is working, then one day they flip the switch and shut down your servers and delete the backups (that you paid for)

* AWS: Has a super reasonable policy, first by shutting down the servers so you know

* Linode: Not sure

== Get DDoSd ==

* Digital Ocean: 24 hour blackhole, zero support or human contact in this time

* AWS: Servers kept alive, got some engineering assistance

* Linode: 24 (?) hour blackhole, a bit of really bad support

== Physical Server Upgrades ==

* Digital Ocean: Not bad

* AWS: Amazing. Zero downtime, I have 4 year uptime on many servers

* Linode: Botched my servers, more times than I can count. Even had support reboot the WRONG servers of mine when I was talking with them

== Bandwidth ===

* Digital Ocean: shitty and cheap

* AWS: Amazing and stupidly expensive

* Linode: Decent and cheap

I could go on. If it was a hobby project, I'd probably just use Digital Ocean because of their cheap prices and sleek control panel. (Or actually I'd use vultr)

But for anything serious where I have a budget for servers, you'd be crazy to use anything about AWS or Google Cloud

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

* AWS: Servers kept alive, got some engineering assistance

This depends a lot on what level of customer you are.

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

Vultr looks very comparable to DigitalOcean. I'm curious why they left DO out of their benchmarks. It seems the most obvious comparison.

https://www.vultr.com/benchmarks/

sseveran3• 10 years ago

The value of AWS is all the other services that they offer. While you could assemble them yourself, building on AWS allows you to move really fast and scalable infrastructure.

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

Things like load balancers and database servers especially, though they do charge a pretty penny for the latter.

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

A significant amount use DigitalOcean and Linode; AWS just really dominates.

https://www.gra.pe/?p=36

greyskull• 10 years ago

Why is AWS so popular? I don't mean that as a question with pretense, just genuinely curious.

artursapek• 10 years ago

Professional, reliable, good tooling, lots of offerings

bjterry• 10 years ago

Amazon gives away a silly amount of free AWS credits to some accelerator programs. At 500 Startups I think they give you $50,000 or $100,000 in credits that expire after a couple years. I assume they do the same for YC. Obviously most companies can't even use more than a tiny fraction of that.

tedmiston12• 10 years ago

Correct.

Either it expires after a certain time period, IIRC 2? years, or your startup takes off and you burn through the rest quickly.

fapjacks• 10 years ago

I would use $50k or $100k in AWS credits, man.

serialpreneur• 10 years ago

I don't see tech stacks here. Mostly adtech!

thedrake• 10 years ago

BuiltWith has a much more extensive list of not only YC stacks but several curated lists. https://trends.builtwith.com/tech-reports

the YC stack is here: https://trends.builtwith.com/tech-reports/Y-Combinator

*click the All Technologies dropdown to see all the options

ggiaco• 10 years ago

You can also see a lot of this data over at Siftery, with much of it verified first-hand by the companies themselves (https://siftery.com/groups/y-combinator-portfolio)

pajop3• 10 years ago

comparing Datanyze | Stackshare.io | Builtwith.com

https://www.datanyze.com/domain/?tab=info&domain=datanyze.co...

http://stackshare.io/datanyze/datanyze

http://builtwith.com/datanyze.com

danbmil99• 10 years ago

Still waiting for info about actual tech stacks.

buro9• 10 years ago

Instead of scraping the sites and trying to guess what YC companies are using...

Perhaps just ask them?

Surely every YC company would answer, or at least enough to make the information more valuable than a set of guesses.

Additionally, it would be good to know when YC companies choose other YC company products based on incentives offered (it's free to other alumni), as this disclosure allows others to evaluate whether the choice to use a product was because it was the best product for that task or was potentially skewed by the incentive offered.

mikeboydbrowne• 10 years ago

None of these numbers point to a monopoly on the bizdev/marketing side - is that due to the tools/players being new (I consolidated) or is it likely to stay this fragmented?

base• 10 years ago

Advertising technologies I'm almost sure it's wrong. How do you know from the javascript used if the company uses Adwords? My company uses adwords extensively and all the events and conversions are passed using Google Analytics and the Adwords API.

YC Tech Stacks

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